I read this spread in a general, philosophical way: It’s about duality, the waxing and waning of the moon, the balancing out of forces.
Card #1 is The Lovers attributed to Gemini while the final card, #10, is The Chariot: attributed to Cancer, while vertex of the cross section of the spread is The Moon. These three facts conspire to suggest that the reading represents not just the dynamics of the monthly cycle in general, and specifically our journey from sun in Gemini (started May 21) to sun in Cancer (starts June 21).
The first 9 cards repeat the idea of forces starting strong but containing their own seeds of destruction and withering to forms of weakness or lack. These forms of weakness or lack contain the seeds of new life, leading to new strength tinctured with new weakness and so the cycle continues.
The Chariot in position #10 teaches us that this is how the universe remains a place of swirling change while at the same time remaining totally still: unchanged in its fundamental essence. On a personal level we can embody this too: accepting, the natural ebb and flow of things in life and learning how to best utilize the power of this cycle, symbolized so perfectly by the waxing and waning moon. By learning this esoteric wisdom of how to flow with energy, we can stand steadfast and unshaken like the Chariot.
The Lovers in position #1— here represents a drive for human connection covered over by the Devil in position #2: the spirit of rebellion, individualism, and of putting physical matter before the spiritual.
I see the cross portion of this spread as being subdivided by a diagonal line bisecting the Devil/Lovers pair. The Lovers belongs with Knight of Wands and Ten of disks as cards of good intentions and/or established strength. The Devil belongs with Debauchery and The Moon: cards of the wailing and gnashing of teeth outside the gates of heaven—to be sure— but also cards with secret powers of their own.
I will break down each half of this subdivided cross.
Right Side—
Ten of Disks: Wealth and material rootedness before it gives way to Debauchery.
Knight of Wands: fire of fire standing bravely before life, unassuaged by hopes of success or fear of failure, concerned only with the task at hand. He gives way to the Moon: the dark side of the conscious mind. Unconscious matters undealt with.
Left Side—
Seven of Disks: debauchery, the tincture of corruption in all human affairs brought to fruition. Wealth to greed. The sexual drive to wankery or lasciviousness. Intellectual or spiritual breakthrough to neurosis. Even these demons can be exorcized though; and the space— the post nut clarity— they leave behind is fertile for renewal and growing understanding.
The Devil: a tendency to put material matters before the spiritual, but a rebellious spirit that is a necessary ingredient in development. This is as true in our personal lives as it was in the Old Testament, as it is in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is true socially and politically.
We can not remain the Knight of Wands forever. The romantic and sexual union here represented by the Lovers cannot be our whole story. We have to come up against these elements of corruption within ourselves and within human nature. We must accept difference: the square peg who won’t fit in the round hole but still must find his manifestation somewhere, lest he become an even stronger and more nightmarish force unfulfilled (The proximity of The Devil and The Moon, to put this in Jungian terms, reminds us of the necessity of shadow work).
The Moon represents unconscious desires, fears, knowledge and awareness: everything the knight of wands represses to remain steadfast. He must shove so much to the side to accomplish his task, yet eventually everything rears its head. This is not a bad thing: the unconscious is the divine and the realm of magick. What he must eschew in the light of day will become the inspiration and source of energy behind his next quest (this includes but is not limited to libidinal energy).
The stone the builders reject becomes the corner stone and on and on. We cannot escape this cycle, only understand it and learn to vibe with it.
This process of virtue into vice into new virtue is rooted to human nature and won’t simply go away. The pinnacle of the process— from a human psychological standpoint— come during the great neutralization, as two forces pleasurably negate each other and then steal away to a blissful nothing. What people like Jordan Peterson refer to as the perfect balancing of chaos and order.
We’ll fight this war one hundred times within our own soul before we die, and we’ll see the war play out on a socio-cultural level as many times. As long as the moon is making its cycle, as long as waves are hitting the shores, and hearts are pumping blood through human bodies, no true resolution will ever be reached.
The idea is repeated again in the four cards on the side—
Ace of Wands: the excitement and promise of a new material opportunity (perhaps a new job)?
No sooner is the flower of life plucked though, than it leaves behind an empty space: the Sorrow of the Three of Swords.
This cycle of desire leading to fulfillment, leading to emptiness leading to more desire is the alchemical formula which produces Lust (called strength in previous decks). This libidinal cycle produces the energy that keeps the planet spinning. It’s ingredients include desire, love, wealth, but also sorrow, division, debauchery, the unconscious, The Devil. Learn to master the cycle of these ingredients, and stand forth proud as the Chariot.
——
The Devil, in particular, reminds us that the Spirit of the West is not just Christian but also Faustian. We have to come to terms with the old horned one and the lustful, rebellious spirit he represents. The process is entirely amoral. I’m reminded of the penultimate episode of Succession, and Kendall Roy’s now famous impromptu eulogy of his father:
“he had a vitality a force it could hurt and it did, but my God the sheer… the lives, the livings and the things that he made. And the money….The life blood the oxygen of this wonderful civilization we’ve built from the mud, the money the corpuscles of life gushing around this nation this world filling men and women all around with desire quickening the ambition to own and make and trade and profit and build and improve….great geysers of life he built of buildings he made stand. Of ships, steel hulls. amusements, newspapers, shows, and films, and life. Bloody, complicated life. He made life happen.”
The energy behind things is exactly this amoral, and propagated not by moralizers but by “monsters of will” like Logan Roy.
If you have’t seen the show, Kendall (Jeremy Strong) here eulogizes his late father Logan Roy (Brian Cox): a media magnate and something of a cross between Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. This is delivered just after the Roy children’s Uncle Ewan (played by James Cromwell) has excoriated his late brother as a monster who brought about “terrible things”. This scene highlights the very real, if very ironic, phenomenon that the moral fanatics of our present day—those who would pit their morality against strength and vitality, in the sense described by Nietzsche as slave morality—are no longer Christians but Left Liberal Humanists like the terminally Canadian Uncle Ewan.
No, I don’t think the Waystar Royco of the Succession universe—or the work of the Rupert Murdochs and Donald Trumps of the real universe— are the pinnacle of human accomplishment. I do think in their basic affirmative and energetic character the possess something sorely lacked by their critics, and increasingly rare in society as it is. A vital affirmation of life and the future craved deeply by the human spirit.
I could and perhaps should write more on Succession and all of these themes, but I’ll end here by noting the final thought of Kendall’s eulogy:
He was comfortable with this world. And he knew it. He knew it and he liked it. And I say amen to that.
This notion of being “at home in the world” is actually quite taboo from a gnostic perspective: this world and matter itself being evil, lorded over by a Demi-urge, etc.
Yet even—and perhaps especially— from a vantage point sympathetic to gnosticism, we might find the rebellion extremely compelling.
To dare to look at this world of pain, lorded over by such inexorable processes of waxing and waning as described in my reading of the spread.
To look at this seemingly inescapable karmic cycle and affirm it as good.
Well, that takes a monster of will indeed: a great propagator of life in all it’s amoral magnificence: